PERSONALITY
986
PERSONALITY
is substance thus affected with personality? Analogy in such a matter cannot lead us tlirouah the difhculty. for God is one, and such a test is an im|)(issibility lor want of any true means of comparison. Yet thus much mav be said : So far as it reaches, analogy shows that the personality of the Deity is very possible; for if be- ings of another world could watch the growing results of human civilization, without having the power of tracing out the individual efforts that produce it, they would tind themselves in a somewhat similar difficulty. Humanity, they might reason, is certainly an intelligent substance; but substance is something vague and un- determined ; yet the intelligence that is developing all terrestrial works must be the result of personal design and personal skill: therefore this world-wide humanity must have a definite, personal substance. Adam, in the first instance, was that personal substance. Christ in tiie eiul shall recapitulate (Irenanis) all humanity in himself, we know not how. Therefore in some way that is a present mystery, but of certain future solution, God may be Substance that is All-wise and Absolute, and personality may attach to his being, limiting the Unlimited, and defining the Indefinite {ibid. p. 56-59). In the mean time the idea of personality is mixed up in- timately with all man's highest and noblest notions of the Deity {ibid. p. 57, 240), neither is it possible to form the faintest possible conception of a non-personal God. The religious idea revolts against the negation, which, in fact, would be its annihilation. The sense of personal individual responsibility to a personal God and Father of all would pass away, and a "caput mortuum" of pan- theism would be all that would remain — an illusive Maya for the present, a hopeless Nirvana for the fut- ure. Next, with respect to a plurality of persons in the Deity, Hooker excellently defines the properties that determine this phase of the divine nature ; and his gen- eralization may serve to impress upon the mind the im- possibility of expressing the mutual relations of three hypostases in one substance by any adecpiate term that human language can supply. That which transcends thought can never tind expression by the tongue. The personality of the Father and Holy Spirit is affected by nothing without the divine nature; the personality of the Son has been modified since the incarnation by taking the manhood into God; and a second definition by Locke exactly covers this modification; "Person," he says, "belongs only to intelligent agents, capable of a law and happiness and misery," all of which accidents of personality pertain to Christ, though not to the per- son of the Son of God as pre-existing eternally in the Word. — Blunt, IJicf. of Theol. s. v. See Hvpostatical Unmon ; Sfiisr.vNCE.
"We attribute persomdi/y,'' says Ahrens {Cows de Theologic. ii, 272) "to every being which exists, not solely for others, but which is in the relation of unity ■Nvith itself in existing, or for itself. Thus we refuse personaliiii to a mineral or a stone, because these things exist for others, but not for themselves. An animal, on the contrarj^ which exists for itself, and stands in relation to itself, possesses a degree oi per- sonnli'y. Hut man exists for himself in all his es- sence, in a manner more intimate and more extensive ; that which he is, he is for himself, he h;is conscious- ness of it. Hut God alone exif ts for himself in a man- ner infinite and absolute. God is entirely in relation to himself; for there are no beings out of him to whom he could have relation. His whole essence is for him- self, and this relation is altogether internal ; and it is this intimate and entire relation of God to himself in all his essence which constitutes the divine personali- ty." It should be observed, however, that p;^rsonality implies limitation. "Infinite ])ersonality," therefore, would be a contradiction in terms. The term "per- son," as a])plied to the Godhead, is not used in its or- dinary sense, as denoting a separate licing, but repre- sents the Latin personn or the Greek hypoMash, which means that which stands under or is the sulgcct of